Chapter 51: After

AFTER

“Will.”

The voice that says his name sounds strange in her own ears, not her own, strangled, harsh.

“How—how long have you been there?”

“Long enough.” His face is expressionless. He’s holding his running jacket in one hand and a packet of bacon in the other. Automatically she glances at the clock. It’s 7:59.

“You—you’re not supposed to be back yet,” she manages.

“Ajesh saw me waiting outside. He opened up early.”

Oh God. She feels sick. How much did he hear?

“What the fuck is going on?” he says, and his voice is flat and yet somehow colder than she could ever have imagined Will sounding. Will. Will, her husband, the man she loves with every fiber of her being.

Even the fibers that phoned Ryan to check up on his alibi?whispers her subconscious, but she pushes its accusations away. A sob is rising inside her. This cannot be happening.

“Do you think I killed April?” he says now, dangerously calm. She shakes her head. Tears are starting in her eyes.

“No. No!”

“That’s not what it sounded like.” He puts the bacon on the counter, very, very gently, and takes a step towards her. She starts to shake.

“No, Will, no. I never thought that.”

“If that’s true, why the fuck didn’t you just ask me?” he shouts, and now there is a vein throbbing in his forehead. Hannah wants to throw up.

“Will, please…” It comes out like a long whimper of fear and she sees something flash in his eyes, but she cannot read it. Is it anger? Contempt? Hate?

“Ask me,” he says, coming closer. She has always loved his height, his lean muscled bulk, the way his body makes her feel safe and cocooned. Now she sees it from the other side. She sees the way he could pick her up with one hand by the throat and pin her against the wall. “Ask me!” he shouts, his spit hitting her face, and she flinches in spite of herself. “Ask me if I killed April!”

Hannah’s heart is thumping. Her vision is beginning to crack and fragment, like static spreading across a television screen. She knows she is breathing too fast, and yet she can’t stop. Think of the baby.

And then something stills inside her. It’s as if she has been in a hurricane, and suddenly the eye of the storm is passing over, and that strange illusory calm settles for a moment upon her.

Her vision clears. Her heart slows.

“Did you kill April?” she says, every syllable clear and deliberate.

“What do you think?” he says. And then—he laughs.

In that moment, all the blood seems to drain from her body, leaving her numb and chill as stone. She stands there, staring at him, unable to believe what she has just heard. She was so sure—so certain that he would say no.

She is still staring, horrified, mesmerized, when her phone rings, making her jump convulsively.

“Who’s that, the police?” Will says. His voice is ice-cold, goading, cruel.

November’s voice flickers through Hannah’s memory again—Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.

Oh God, she has been so stupid.

“Hannah?” Will says. He takes a step towards her. She takes a step back. The phone is still ringing. It’s on the counter, within hand’s reach. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

Hannah’s heart is beating so fast and hard she can feel it in her wrists, in her neck. The baby writhes inside her.

Will is between her and the door.

She has been so, so stupid…

She takes another step back towards the window, not breaking eye contact with Will, and with her free hand she gropes blindly for the phone, never losing Will’s gaze as she grabs it. He takes a step forwards. She takes another step back. He takes another step forwards.

She is backing into a corner, and she knows it, but if she can just get him to take one more step forwards…

She takes one more step back.

He takes one more step forwards.

And Hannah runs.

Will swears, but that last step has put the kitchen table between him and the door, while giving Hannah a clear line.

She runs, barefoot, out of the kitchen, down the hallway and down the stairs, hearing a thumping clatter as Will tries to follow and trips over one of their kitchen chairs. Out in the street the cobbles are bitterly cold under her feet and wet from the night’s rain, and she slips, but then rights herself and runs towards the open end of the mews. Behind her she can hear Will’s feet pounding down the stairs.

Her heart feels like it’s going to burst. She holds her stomach with one hand, as if she can protect her unborn child. She forces herself to run just a little faster down the last few meters of Stockbridge Mews… and then she is out, onto the main road, skidding around the corner, the asphalt of the council-owned pavement biting into the soles of her feet. She looks wildly up and down the road. A car passes. Then another. They are going too fast for her to stop, and they don’t spare a glance for the wild-eyed pregnant woman running barefoot down the street. Can she flag someone down? Run into a cafe? The nearest one is closed and she draws a shuddering breath and runs on, towards the park.

“Hannah!” she hears from behind her, Will’s roar of a kind of fury she has never heard from him before. He has rounded the corner onto the main road and is gaining on her. “Hannah, what are you doing?”

She makes her legs work harder—runs across a junction without looking, and then another and then—

There is a screech of tires and the sound of swearing.

“Jesus Christ! You trying to get yourself killed?”

It’s a taxi driver. He’s leaning out of the window of his cab, his face red with annoyance.

“You coulda killed yourself—and the bairn!”

Hannah just stands for a moment, panting hopelessly, her hands resting on the bonnet of the car. Will can’t do anything in front of a taxi driver, surely? But the man is going to drive away—he’s going to leave her—and then she looks up, and she feels a huge, drenching wash of relief.

The yellow light on top of the cab is on. The taxi is for hire.

She doesn’t wait. She runs around to the side, wrenches open the door, just as Will comes pounding up to the junction.

“Drive,” she says urgently to the cabbie. “That’s my husband, he—we just had a row.”

A row. The word comes out like a sob, and yet it’s so pathetically understated. “A row” barely even starts to cover it. I have just found out my husband might be a killer.

And yet she can’t say it. She can’t bring herself to say the words, to make them real.

Will is a killer.

Will murdered April.

If she keeps repeating the words to herself, perhaps she can make herself believe them.

“Understood, hen,” the driver says sympathetically. “Aye, it’s a tough one. Where can I take you? Your mammy? Or maybe not, by your accent?”

Hannah thinks of her mother, far away in Dodsworth, several hundred miles south, and tears spring into her eyes. If only she could go back there, fall into her mum’s arms, sob out her troubles.

But she can’t. It’s a good eight hours on the train, more on a Sunday. She has no coat, no shoes. She doesn’t even have any money, apart from Google Pay on her phone. She can hardly take a taxi to southern England. Where can she go?

And then it comes to her.

Hugh.

Hugh will shelter her. Hugh will loan her money and she can buy herself a jacket and some warm boots and figure out her next move.

“Do you know Great King Street?” she asks the driver, who nods.

“Aye.”

“Thanks.” She sinks back onto the seat, feeling her heart slow and her numb feet begin to thaw. “Thanks, I’d like to go there.”